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Krissy Clark

Senior Reporter, Wealth & Poverty

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Krissy Clark is the senior reporter for Marketplace’s Wealth & Poverty Desk, where she helps make sense of some of the most fundamental shifts happening in the U.S. economy, including the growth of the low-wage service sector and the shrinking of middle-wage, middle-class jobs. Clark tracks the widening gap between rich and poor in the U.S. and what it means for economic mobility in America.

Some of Clark’s favorite stories involve getting people from different parts of the economy to talk to each other. She has prompted conversations between a Silicon Valley CEO and a worker whose job he wanted to automate, brought two economists who disagreed about the effects of raising the minimum wage to Taco Bell for a debate, and set up a virtual “confessional booth” for people to reveal their financial safety nets. Clark’s reporting has taken her to abandoned factories in Flint, Michigan; the post-tornado ruins of Moore, Oklahoma; and the epicenter of the foreclosure crisis in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Before joining Marketplace, Clark was the LA Bureau Chief for KQED public radio’s California Report. She has been a regular contributor to NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered, BBC Radio, Freakonomics and StoryCorps.

Clark’s stories and documentaries have won awards from Scripps-Howard, PRNDI, NFCB, an Investigative Reporters and Editors Medal of Honor, and First Prize in Investigative Reporting from the National Awards for Education Reporting. Clark was a finalist for the Livingston Award for Journalists Under 35, and a finalist for a Third Coast Award for Best News Feature.

Clark is a frequent public speaker and has given talks at Google, Stanford University, the University of Kansas, Web 2.0, the Conference on World Affairs, and the Aspen Institute.

In 2009, Clark won a Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford to spend a year experimenting with location-aware technologies as tools for story-telling. She is the founder of Storieseverywhere.org, a location-based, trans-media storytelling project whose audio installations have been exhibited by The New Museum in NYC and San Francisco’s Gray Area Foundation for the Arts.

Clark graduated cum laude from Yale University with a B.A. in The Humanities. She grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and likes to read maps.

Features by Krissy Clark

Janitors who clean the offices of some of the world's richest corporations in this Texas city are among the lowest paid in the country. They have been on strike this summer trying to raise the definition of a low-level wage.

The Federal Reserve meets again this week, and the buzz is that Chairman Ben Bernanke could be considering some "new tools," for stimulating growth -- perhaps using interest rates to encourage banks to take some risks with their money.